With DSL, though, I think everything is built for 24/7 connectivity, and even your voice calls are handled with data packets.

No, that's not how it works. The wires your phone uses can handle signals from DC to about 1MHz. The voice line uses 300Hz - 3kHz. Then there is a gap to about 10kHz, then DSL uses from about 20kHz to 1MHz. There's a splitter at your house, and the high frequency signals go to the DSL modem, and the low freqs to your phone. There's the same at the telco office: the low freqs go to the phone switch, and the high freqs to another DSL modem. So, your voice is still analog (at least until it hits the switch), and your DSL data never touches the phone network. That's why the phone companies love DSL: your switch usage goes back to the "old model" of usage (lots of short calls), and your data usage is handled seperately.

It is a digital connection but "just" a technology that can be used for making phone calls too.

But data users are the norm nowadays when you consider total phone usage (residential AND business use). The voice only user is the oddball. You might as well say, why should Granny Mae pay for phone upgrades to the LD network when she only makes local calls, or why to pay for supporting touch-tone dialing when she still uses her ol' rotary phone. If the costs of new tech had to be paid only by its users and not by all phone subscribers, no one could afford the new tech until lots of people sign up, but that wouldn't happen because it would be too expensive for those first users. Kind of a catch-22 there.

Is this really true? I would think that for the typical modem user, given the sporatic data transfer nature of Web browsing (little happens after the page is locally cached until you go to the next), that a regular phone call moves way more total data over the same period of time.

But the lines still tied up even when there is no traffic. Plus modem users tend to use the line for a lot longer. Most conversations don't last an hour.

Well, feel free to stagnate away counting up all that telco revenue, my friend. The rest of the world will wave to you as they pass you by and leave the UK in the technological dust.

So now are you going to find some way to insult me and my country in order to make your point?

Sorry but a "I agree!" and a flame of an AC do not a Score:3 post make. Tell me I'm wrong, moderators?

Oops. Baaaad move. And wrong on both accounts. *WHACK!* Fastolfe--. Heh heh heh.

We're very quickly entering an era where computers with Internet access are no longer a luxury, but are a requirement to access certain goods and services. Consider, for example, Arizona's DMV (I think it was Arizona) that is offering services over the web. I'm sure it would love to offer services over the web exclusively if it could, with web-enabled kiosks in place of the old public offices for people who can't get a computer of their own. While you're not required to own a computer with a web browser in such a world, it would be very much in your own interest to have one. (Much like a car -- there's no explicit requirement to own a car, but most people feel they need one because life without one is pretty painful, at least in most places in the US.)

Lets not forget Voice over IP and other such technologies either: Your only line might be a data line.

On a separate angle, consider that traditional ISPs are already starting to feel the heat from cable modem and DSL services -- neither of which affects the capacity of the POTS network and therefore would likely be exempt from the proposed "tax". Instituting a tax such as this would only make life worse for these traditional ISPs, possibly slowly forcing them out of business. Where does the business go? At least some of these customers will upgrade to DSL or cable-modem when their current ISP goes away.

Who's providing the DSL and the cable-modems? Phone and cable companies -- and these days, the line between the two is getting blurrier and blurrier. OpTel, my cable company (and ISP, since I have a cable modem), would love to be my phone company as well. (They offer both phone and cable services in my apartment complex.) Also, doesn't AT&T have a stake in TCI? It would be interesting to see the list of companies that are lobbying for this tax, and what they stand to gain as traditional ISPs fall into obscurity/insolvency.

They recently upgraded the phone system where my parents live to digital routers. This was done to allow for more phone lines and allow for a clearer line. However their modem took a drop in speed because now their phone lines get converted from analog to digital and then back to analog when it goes to their isp service. this results in slightly more line noise and a reduction in speed.

So if you are a modem user and you are in a area with digital routers (most of the US soon) your modem is slower then it should be because of the improvements that the Phone Companies made for the Voice users.

What upgrades? Over POTS lines of average quality, with no upgrades in particular for the benefit of modem users, one ought to be able to achieve a 45K connection with a V.90 modem. In my area this is impossible due to the degraded condition of the lines. I cannot connect from home any faster than 26.6k myself. No, it's not my ISP - the owner lives right around the corner from me, and he can't connect any faster than I can.

If you're talking about the sort of upgrades that enable such services as DSL, then the users are already charged for it by paying a premium rate for the service.

It seems to me the FCC, goaded by the local telcos, is approaching this from the wrong direction by aiming the tax at the ISPs. The analogy with long distance service is faulty. In that case, the long distance company is connecting to me - for the benefit of their customer on the other end of the line, who ultimately bears the cost of completing the connection through the local telco at my end. But in this case, I'm the one who connects to my ISP, not the other way around. I have a contract with my local telco to provide me with local connections at a flat rate. If the telco wants to do things differently, then they ought to do so by dealing directly with me. But they don't dare directly approach their customers for higher rates, which customers invariably feel that they're paying too much for substandard service already. So instead, they're trying to make it look as if the ISPs are the ones tying up the lines. This way they can make the ISPs do their dirty work for them, since they're the ones who are going to have to pass on the additional costs in order to stay in business.

Cell Phone companys don't have their own phone network. Someone has to pay for the connection when your call gets connected to a Cell Phone Node and then gets connected to a local phone system. Part of that per minute rate you pay goes to the local phone company.

We don't like the government telling phone companies that they HAVE to charge ISPs for using their phone lines.

Well, I'm an American and have lived in several parts of the US, and I don't get local calls for free -- never have. I've always had to choose between service plans; the most common is to pay a small flat fee for, say 30 or so unlimited length calls within a limited local area. Other "local" calls are metered per minute and by time of day. When the monthly purchased allowance is used up, normal per minute charges apply.

There are other plans, I'm sure, but it's a myth to believe that local calls are free, they're just usually paid for in a different manner than one might otherwise expect.

--
Donate free food to hungry people at: http://www.thehungersite.com

I'm sure your intentions are good, and you may actually believe that's what will happen (your other posts don't sound that naive, though), but a quick look through the history of such government programs will show you that it's far more likely that the net effect will be to move more people from tier 2 to tier 3. The only time such things actually filter down to the poor is after the 'rich' markets are saturated; then some sort of low cost service is introduced in order to keep expanding business.

Most telephone traffic used to be carried over T1 lines (26 channels at 56k, I believe). So if you make a long distance call across the US, you pay a certain rate for use of that network.

If you dial in to an ISP locally, you're still using a 56k connection through the telco's network that spans the continent. Shouldn't the charges be similar?

--
Good beta testers are worth their weight in gold.

ISDN could have been the RBOC's solution to this years ago. The setup/connect time for ISDN is only a second or two so there is no need to stay connected unless you are continuously sending or receiving data. Keep in mind that an ISDN channel uses the same amount of bandwidth as a regular phone line (although it's common to bond two channels together.)

Instead of fostering this technology, the RBOC's have kept the prices prohibitive. In most areas of the US the user is charged per minute per channel or an exhorbitant flat rate (more expensive than a T1 when I lived in NJ.) To make matters worse you have to pay for a full minute even if that e-mail only took 5 seconds to transfer. The average home user would tie up the network a lot less if their connection only came up long enough to load a web page then closed down again--almost definately less than a voice call rather than more!

So the RBOC's force people to tie up their network and then complain that they need more money because of it. Do you think that they didn't realize this would happen?

Think about the services RBOCs supply to home users... The bare minimum are affordable because RBOCs are local monopolies that don't benefit at all by giving more than the bare minimum--they basically charge as much as they are allowed for extra services. Over the last couple years more competition has entered the picture, and only now are we seeing reasonably priced data services showing up from the RBOCs.

So, why wouldn't they make prices more reasonable for ISDN if it will lessen the load on their network? Because they don't have to! Why give it away if they can charge 2-4 cents a minute for local calls? Why give away call waiting if they can charge $2.50 a month for it? (You don't think that it costs them any extra to provide you with call waiting do you?)

Greed.

All I can say is thank * for my cablemodem. As far as I'm concerned the RBOC's can go fsck themselves.

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No I don't think I ever said that. What I was getting at is that most RBOCs have deliberately forced home users to tie up their networks. By the way, they DO charge per minute for local voice calls on your ISDN line in Bell Atlantic-NJ territory (at least they did when I lived there. This always pissed me off too--I'd need a second phone line anyway with ISDN just so I wouldn't have to pay for local voice calls--AFAIK most RBOCs are kind enough to let you make local voice calls for free over ISDN though.)

I don't think ISDN is the greatest technology either. The reason that I pointed at ISDN is that it's been around for years (>20 IIRC), and even offered affordably in some areas of the country.

Almost all of the poor bastards that are stuck with a 53.3kbit (maximum) connection, could be surfing at 128kbit (actual) and tying up the network less...if only the RBOCs fostered rather than stifled it over the last several years.

Of course the phone companies are greedy. Any for-profit public corporation is required by law to seek maximum profit for its shareholders. That doesn't mean that they are acting maliciously.

Of course.

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I'm paying the phone company $15/mo for unlimited local calling. I'm paying for unlimited access, and if they want more money they can up the price of unlimited accounts. Or, they could just get rid of the problem by adding more hardware.

We don't need to solve a non-problem by more unconstitutional regulations from a regulatory body that has no right to exist.

-------- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. -Chandon Seldon

You have absolutely no concept of what the term "leased-line" means, do you? It's where you pay for your own personal physical wire from point A to point B. You can send no data at all over it for each month or pump data through it 24/7. It's your line. When you're not using it, no one else is either. That's why it always costs the same. Most big ISPs connect to one another via this method. Why should they have to pay more based on how many bits they send over the wire. It's THEIR wire so long as they keep paying the lease on it.

This is like charging people a "tax" on their leased apartments whenever anyone enters or exits the apartment. They PAID to lease it to themselves exclusively.

then again, I might be babbling again. I miss my BBS's. :-(

-OnyxRaven of #NthDimension (irc.dal.net)

They all want money, and this is understandable -- free market and all that. What puzzles me, though, is -- WHY Why now? When the data-intensity of the net grows, and the regular modem lines are slowly becoming simply incapable of keeping up with the needed speeds -- why try to squeeze water out of what is rapidly becoming stone? Do they really think they actually WILL get any money out of this?

Me pesonally, if this happens, I am ditching my dedicated flat-rate phone line and finally breaking down for a cable modem... and I would bet the farm that there are plenty of others like me, who would simply view this as the last drop in the cupfull of reasons for ditching modems.

--
Victor Danilchenko

I thought the FCC was here to really protect the consumer not make the already rich local phone companies even richer. Hell they already charge LD companies to connect to the network thus passing it on to the consumer in the form of a Carrier Line Charge. Anyway don't get me started on my local phone company. You would think that the amount of money they make they could hire someone with a brain.

Good is never good enough when you dream of being the best.

Regional Bell Operating Company, if memory serves. It's the official name for the Baby Bells, if I'm recalling correctly. If not, then could someone please smack me with a clue stick?

After all all those coke machines with phone numbers need equal access too :-)

Now that DSL is becoming available (almost) everywhere they also have another incentive to move people off of those modems - they want a bigger piece of the pie - that $49 I pay for my DSL line goes largely to the telco - but tjey use the same phone line as my voive - that's right they get to charge twice for the same pair - pretty cool huh! - mind you in my case it's way cheaper than the frame realy line it replaces but I suspect I'm not the usual case.

where I live (the Bay Area) there are competing TV spots for DSL on at least every hour

Here at least I think they've realised that there's money to be made from data and if they don't the cable companies will - here there's even the spectre of other 3rd-party companies who are coming in and actually laying residential fibre - potentially competing in the phone, data and cable biz too - this competition can only be good for us - yesterday's announcements from the east coast of SBC spending big and putting in residential fibre so that DSL can reach more houses is yet another indicator of this same trend

In short the telcos are worried - and that's good for us comsumers!

However, take a close look at what the phone companies are saying. Basically, their complaint is that phone network X is being congested by too much modem usage, where the average call length is longer than a voice call.

But, BOTH types of calls are circuit-switched. So the congestion has been created by the phone companies themselves. They oversell phone lines to their customers - i.e. many more people have a 2nd analog line these days.

If the phone companies were really serious about reducing their system usage, they would take action on a couple of fronts.

First, if anyone requests a 2nd phone line, offer FREE voice mail service as an alternative. In other words, a way for people to leave them a message when they are online. Second, the phone companies should place ISDN at a competitve price. I don't understand the technical stuff behind it (someone fill in?) but it seems to me that a digital connection would be less of a drain on the phone network than an analog one.

But let's face it: the phone companies don't WANT to relieve the usage. They want to increase their revenue.

Best regards,

SEAL

Hmmm... if the FCC imposes (or enables telcos to impose) a $.10/minute connect fee for all internet connections, that'd be great amunition against spam. Much like Fax Spam, the end-user would be paying out of pocket to receive unsolicited crap. Just trying to be optimistic :-)

On a more pertinent note, how would telephone companies even be able to meter this? To their telephone switches, a modem signal is just a REALLY noisy voice call. If they started monitoring calls to differentiate between a modem call and a voice call, we'd be looking at some pretty severe privacy issues as well

The only system which might work would be a special prefix of some sort, like hash-5-0 or something, to signal that you'd be making a data connection--but this, of course, could be circumvented.

You have been conditioned by the telco to think this way. Really, why should you have to "choose" a dialing plan at all? Why doesn't the telco just initially charge you by the minute on the low-monthly-fee plan, then if you go over x minutes, your plan automatically switches to the flat-rate plan for this month? Go over x minutes on LD and you're auto-switched over to the Whatever-LD-Nickel plan. The only reason to offer "plans" is to deliberately take advantage of and to cash in on people who choose the wrong plan for themselves. It's really quite evil when you think about it this way.

• Per-minute charge: you make a 10 minute call, you are charged X for the first minute and X/Y for each additional.
  
  
• Message rate: you pay one fixed price per call, regardless of length: you make a 10 minute call, you are charged 10.6 cents
  
  
• Flat rate: you pay one fixed price per month, make as many local area calls as you like: you make a hundred 10 minute calls, you are charged X per month.
  

I'm inclined to think that this will be shot down due to the sheer influence of upscale voters getting off on cheap access to the Internet, but it's hard to underestimate the stupidity of a federal bureaucracy, esp. when large companies are throwing vast amounts of money at legislators.

I guess it kind of depends on how the ISPs would pass the charge onto the customers - if they passed the charge directly to the customers, then the heavy users would get dinged really big (and might end up going to a always-on connection), whereas the casual user might just note a little rise in the cost. The ISPs might spread the cost out among all their users, in which case everybody would notice the price of the service had gone up a bit. In either case, would there really be all that much of a difference in cost to the average user?

In either case, I would expect even more pressure for people to move to always-on net connections. What would cause the most PR damage is that the people who don't have such connections available (rural, ghettos, etc) would be forced to pay the extra - and they're exactly the people who can't afford such "regressive taxes".

Where in the heck do you get these figures? As owner of an ISP I can say that average usage is quite a bit higher, as are prices.

And I'm in the area /.'s think is sooooo ancient: Kansas.

The telcos have been chasing people off of dedicated circuits for years-- ask anyone in the broadcast industry. Now they're complaining that all the long-term traffic on their voice circuits is making them lose money. Sorry, I can read quarterly reports as well as anyone. What they really mean is they're not making as much money as they used to.

What the FCC needs to do is tell them "deal with it." And instead of running to the government, what the companies need to do is realize that if they made the cost of DSLs and ISDNs reasonable, maybe more of that traffic would move on to them!

As others have pointed out, these fees are banned until 2001; unless there's a reason to expect this ban to be lifted at that time, this simply gives people something to panic about after Y2K.

JMC

The price structure represents more than just the predicted amount of traffic going over the wire. It also has to do with the value of the line, as well as some of the politics that go into regulating a monopoly.

Quite simply, businesses get alot more monetary benefit out of having a phone line than do home users. Most businesses wouldn't be in business if they didn't have a phone line nowadays, since they would have a difficult time running the business. So, having a phone line is very valuable to the business. Businesses also have deeper pockets, so it seems justified that a business line cost more than a home line.

Residential lines are more convenient than anything. People won't be "going out of business" if they don't have phones. So, from that standpoint, phone lines don't carry the monetary benefit for residential customers that they do for businesses. So generally, residential service is less valuable than business service, and so it makes sense to charge less. Also, telephones provide basic access to emergency services as well, which is where politics come in: Since Telcos tend to operate as monopolies or near-monopolies in most regions, and since telephone access is needed for services such as 911, telcos need to offer lower-than-usual rates for the low end of the cost spectrum.

There's a third argument which sews up the business vs. residential pricing policy rather nicely as well: The major reason that business phones are so valuable is so that customers can call the business. Most businesses serve the public-at-large, and so the phones are only truly valuable if phones are widely deployed amongst the public. Yet another reason for the cost disparity.

Per-minute fees - The only people who have the equipment anywhere near in place to monitor online usage to the minute are the ISPs (or online providers) themselves. The telco can't easily prove if a line is being used for voice or data or both without listening to it. I seriously doubt that telcos are going to install the equipment to monitor usage in this way since they really have no way to check and correlate calls with every ISP that a modem user could dial in to. If a per-minute fee is imposed, it will be imposed on the ISPs who would pass on the charge itself plus a penny or two for "processing" fees. Once ISPs are charged for per-minute fees, the feds will need additional staff to track and process such billing as well, which would require capital expenditure, and we all know what that means...

Flat fees - As with the per-minute fees, the first question is who to charge. If we send the charge to the ISPs, they'll pass it on to their customers as higher monthly access rates. Users who are online more than 60 hours per month (to pick a number out of the air) may not mind because they're online so much, but Gramma & Grampa who are online less than 3 hours a month will probably decide to drop the service. If we send the charge to the telcos, how is the telco going to prove that a particular telephone user is also a dialup internet user as opposed to a cable modem internet user or corporate LAN internet user? Also, how is the telco going to justify spreading this charge over telephone users who never access the internet?

Further barrier 1, corporate LAN access - Like the per-minute fee, the ISP is the only place where the access can be reliably tracked. Corporate America has some pretty expensive lobbyists that they can throw around to combat any additional fees imposed on them. High-revenue companies that rely on internet connectivity will not stand by as their revenue streams are significantly reduced by any additional charges like this.

Further barrier 2, internationalization - It seems that the US Government is viewing the internet as a US-only enterprise again. No single governing body can legislate over the internet since no single body's jurisdiction completely covers the physical location of the internet. Sure, a majority of connections go through Virginia, and mine is to a local provider in Wisconsin, but what about everyone in .au or .il or .es or .jp or any other TLD other than .us?

Further barrier 3, internet time - innovation on the internet surpasses legislation speed by light years. By the time a bill like this would pass through to law, the more avid internet users will find other means to access the internet that avoid these charges.

In short (too late!), I seriously doubt that any kind of "modem tax" would be enacted any time soon.

<DennisMiller>But, I could be wrong...</DennisMiller>

While there is some amount of logical justification, I find it very hard to believe that the phone companies are losing money. Bell Atlantic, for instance, is expecting $3.00/share annual earnings this year. Bell South has estimated earnings of $2.00/share. These do not sound like companies who are in need of additional capital.

I believe those hardest hit by this will be people who work from home. Assuming a rate of 2 cents per minute, and 40 hours/week, it suddenly costs $250/month to work from home. This is effectively a $3000/year after-tax salary deduction which, while not a fortune, is certainly the difference between being able to save enough money to send your child to college, and having a child who graduates with $50,000 in loans.

I'd be very interested in hearing a compelling counter-argument in favor of the charges. I have a lot of trouble believing that the ACTUAL telco costs caused by an ISP cause it to become unprofitable. Assuming a 10,000 user ISP, one can assume that there's around 1,000 telephone lines on the ISP side, and probably 3,000 dedicated lines for clients. Assuming charges similar to what I pay ($30/month), that's $120,000/month. If the phone company can't route those calls for that amount of money, I have to believe it's the phone comapny's own fault.

Linux/m68k; Debian CDs.

Case in point:
my FCC rant from the last time I tried to check on this stuff... I never got a real reply from them, either. And we pay money for this?

66-75% of the Phone Company's cost of providing local service is the provision and maintenance of the wires between the subscriber and the central office. This is not usage sensitive.

The sizing of the usage sensitive components of the telephone network is based on providing an acceptable level of service during the peak calling hour of the day, which is usually during business hours. Off-peak usage of these components essentially costs nothing since the capacity is going to be there whether or not it is used.

Think of it as a highway/motorway, that is made of some miracle material that can't be damaged by traffic. The highway is designed to be large enough to carry rush-hour traffic at a reasonable speed. You can drive your car around the highway for 16 hours a day without costing the highway owners any money, as long as you stay off the road during rush-hour.

The telephone companies had made a ton of money from the installation of second phone lines for Internet access, far in excess of what little money has been spent on reengineering central offices with congestion problems.

Guess how many phone company executives in the USA have an engineering degree? One. That should tell you something about the business.

The cost of providing service has been declining for years due to advancements in technology and layoffs of skilled labor. The phone companies have invested their monopoly profits in cellular systems, cable systems and foreign ventures, just about everything except their core business. Service quality levels have been declining and the phone companies show little or no interest in providing new services or upgrading their infrastructure.

The Bells should be broken up and forced to compete in the real world.

What is costly within a CO is the switching process, something that is obviously done far less often when someone stays connected for a long time, like when surfing the web.

Sure, but I can imagine that it will get tougher as the years pass by. Don't forget that in a whole lot of countrys the 'modem tax' has allready been 'introduced' and there is no way around it anymore. I'm not all that familier with US politics but I can't help thinking that the minute the goverment sees a potential income through phone taxes they'll be sure to consider it. And perhaps it won't be this time, or the next, but once it gets through....

Thats why I think it is a good thing to mention this if it becomes an issue. I mean; suppose it does come to the point I mentioned above and you would not be informed by magazines, like /., because everyone believes 'it will never happen'. Result could be that hardly anyone will protest against it. Like I said; I don't know how the US goverment handles stuff like that but over here in Europe they can be darn slippery from time to time.

With kind regards, Lion-O